Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Ian Lamont writes "Despite Microsoft's aim to take on Adobe Flash with Silverlight, the company has decided to support Flash on Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft has also licensed the Adobe Reader LE software, so owners of Windows Mobile devices will be able to view PDFs. The two companies are working together on integration and OEM distribution, but Microsoft is still mum on when consumers will be able to use Flash or Silverlight on their Windows Mobile phones. The article points out that Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG already support Flash, but only Nokia has announced Silverlight support, and only on some models starting later this year. The other major handset maker — Apple — doesn't support Flash on the iPhone and has no plans to do so in the near future."

No, it doesn't. The GPL (and all other "open" licenses) do nothing to grant you a patent license or to protect you from needing them. There is no assurance that some Joe's open source free software doesn't unknowingly infringe on someone else's patent.

The issue is that software patents stand against the ideals of Free Software. Stallman has long stood against software patents, and boycotted GIF and Amazon for years. Therefore, the implementation of Silverlight cannot be said to conform to the spirit of the Free Software movement. It's a free implementation, but it's not a Free one.

His point, which is completely valid, is that Free software with a capital F doesn't automagically protect you from software patents. Which is 100% true. Stallman can do whatever he wants, but if Joe Coder releases a piece of Free Software that violates a software patent, the virtue that it's Free doesn't supercede the patent.

So in the end it doesn't matter. You can get screwed either way. Pick your poison.

I think the point here is more that in the case of things like Mono, they blatantly violate a known patent, and exist mostly by the permission of the patent holder. The risk of implementing anything on Mono (or similar patent encumbered software) is that at any time the patent holder can step in and throw a major wrench in your operations. With a truly "Free" implementation there is no known patent infringement, and even though there's always the chance it violates a patent held by someone somewhere the odd

I think that software patents are bad as well; however, it's also stupid to say that they are bad because RMS said so.

There is a cult of personality built up around RMS, and there's nothing more frustrating than talking to someone who thinks that old hippy is some kind of "visionary" whose ever word is true. The guy wrote a port of emacs and some dogmatic diatribes on how he thinks software development should work, but people treat him like he is the Jesus of open source.

Are you sure? I always thought that Mono was a completely independent implementation. At least that was what I was told at uni.

Independently implemented != safe from patents. It just means it's safe from copyright and certain provisions of the DMCA. Until the idiocy of software patents is abolished doing any sort of development work on absolutely anything is the legal equivalent of running through a minefield.

I have yet to see gnash work, and I've got it installed in Debian, FBSD, and Vector Linux. I keep seeing references to it working, but not here... It's a darn shame. And silverlight/moonlight appears to be the solution to a nonexistent problem.

Are any of those implementations, free or not, really secure?
Or am I going to have to patch the software on my mobile too?

Security has a number of dimensions. A heterogenous environment is more secure because a disease vector can spread less rapidly; and in a population with a dominant phenotype, disease vectors which attack that phenotype will be more successful and spread much more rapidly than ones which attack the recessive phenotype. Which is part of why there are fewer successful malware attacks on Linux than on Windows, on Firefox than on IE, but more on Apache than IIS. It's not (only) because Linux and Firefox are o

From the Flash SDK page: "This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback." This is exactly why Flash is not actually documented or open.

Maybe this is just me, but I'd like to see a totally independent open standard, similar to how Ogg Vorbis is an independent standard with compressed audio, or PNG is an independent format for displaying pictures.This would have to take a lot of thought because it would be hard to get developers on board yet another Web standard, and a lot of man months would have to be put in to check every line of code for potential exploits. It would help having the reader either set its UID to nobody in UNIX, or in Wind

Yes it would be so much better to replace HTML with something from the makers of the Win32 API.

Silverlight's attempts to kill Flash will work out about as well as MSN's original effort to replace AOL. By the time it can catch up, there won't be any contest left. The real solution is to improve the HTML spec to the point where we don't need proprietary add-ons. WHATWG and HTML 5 will go a long way in doing that.

The real solution is to improve the HTML spec to the point where we don't need proprietary add-ons.

Yes and No to that.

Not needing proprietary add-ons like Flash and Silverlight is indeed a noble and desirable goal.

It's questionable however that an improved HTML spec. is the solution. HTML web-apps using AJAX/whatever techniques have serious limitations. HTML 5 looks like an improvement, and the new DOM interface APIs are a Good Thing, but it certainly doesn't make possible the kind of apps you can already create with Flash or Silverlight.

A Free Software implementation that is better for users than either Flash or Silverlight. Since they are already free for users, cost isn't a huge factor, and since(judging based on current behavior) users seem a lot more concerned about the value they perceive some software to provide than they care about "Freedom", the easiest(perhaps only) way to win is to be better.

SVG is a vector format allowing backgrounds/bitmaps to be hosted within any vecor in which all objects are fully DOM accessible, meaning the graphic elemetns can be programmed as are any page elements. This means that it is easul extensible using any of the AJAX techniques. There is also a whole suite of behaviors/movements that are defined in the specification.One good place for this is the old Adobe SVG Community page

There's already a free alternative well supported on mobile phones... SVG TinyWhat is needed there is a good free Authoring tool. The only one that is worth anything right now is Ikivo Animator... you can see a demo here [adobe.com]

InkScape is good for creating SVG artwork but it doesn't have a timeline or scripting support for animations or interactivity.

This is called out on an SVG compliance comment on their wiki [inkscape.org]

The other authoring tool mentioned there is Beatware but it has disappeared... possibly purchased by anot

Anyone who's been following the misadventures of MS knows the pattern -- they fight to make their software a defacto standard, then break compatibility with everything non-MS as soon as they get there. It behooves the FOSS community to just say no to MS's crap.

in the mobile space? Are you saying that Microsoft has a monopoly there?Here's a a smartphone chart by OS [roughlydrafted.com] that I found...

If you believe it Windows Mobile has 25% market share, which, in my mind, means that they don't have a monopoly and can implement almost anything they want to, because there are... wait for it... CHOICES in the mobile OS arena.

Not sure what your point is, or whether you're being sarcastic, but...If you're saying Apple has a proprietary format to compete with Flash, then what is it? QuickTime? Or AAC/MPEG-4? Flash seems to fit a different niche that those formats. Microsoft must be supporting Flash for the same reason. WMV is similar to AAC/MPEG-4 in that it's in a different niche than Flash.

I thought I read somewhere that Apple have decided against Flash for some purely functional reasons. Apple wouldn't deliberately cut themsel

I didn't think there was a version of silverlight for mobile devices? Perhaps I just missed it.

And the deal is for FlashLite, which supports a crappy / old set of API's and is only of use to people developing specifically for it. Getting the real flash player on phones would be a whole lot more useful, but it ain't the best performing application in embedded systems.

I was hoping mobile devices would stay away from flash long enough to force web developers to provide non-flash required systems - so that all of us could choose to have flash on or off. Most sites shouldn't absolutely require flash just to navigate around.

Note that some flash videos like youtube videos, won't run in this implementation of Flash (so perhaps the article is referring to a version of Flash that *will* run streaming video). The widgets that web site designers tend to embed in their bloated websites do load for me with Windows Mobile 2003.

The "news" part of this may be that it's MS supporting this, not Adobe as it currently is, which may mean a better implementation.

The headline is full of suck. It's not that MS is finally supporting flash or PDF, they're just shipping their OS with it already installed. Like you said it's been there for years, just as a separate download.

From TFA: "so that Windows Mobile phone users can view Flash content in the Internet Explorer Mobile browser". Windows-based PocketPC != Windows-based Smartphone. Yeah, PocketPC's and Smartphones can both can run Windows Mobile but Smartphones haven't been able to run the Flash player you mentioned. This is great news for those that want Flash on a cellphone.

1. For entertainment/cartoons videos. Not terribly important to me.
2. To overcomplicate access to various types of media (mainly so its harder to directly download the media, which makes it impossible to save it an play it offline)
3. By incompetent "webmasterz" to make websites hard to use and look like shit, preventing any possibility of changing the font sizes or colors (becuase they are always incredibly tiny and fuzzy, and in horridly hard to read garish colors), or to copy/paste the text, and to make all the forms and controls as slow and as bloated as possible.

Apple fans are quick to point out how they love it that their iphones don't support flash, because flash are mainly used for useless ads by stupid web developers.., etc.
How about apple website? They've used plenty to flash-based ads on their pages.

Youtube works just fine on the iPhone. Think of bbc's player. Until the iPhone forced them to offer a nonflash nondrm version, there was no way to use their videos on anything but windows.Flash is horrid. Sites that have chosen to make their information available or usable only if you have flash are horrid. Feel free to point out any site that uses flash that you think uses flash and doesnt suck in terms of usability.

The entire idea of websites being coded in compiled proprietary binary form is bad anyway.

Yes, I beleive I noted somewhere that 'entertainment' was about the only legitimate use of flash (Even disgusting moronic cartoons), and the unavailablity of those sites on nonflash platforms isn't really a big deal.But, imagine/. redone so all navigation and comment viewing was in flash. If that ever happened, I can tell you I wouldnt bother reading the site anymore, nor would a lot of other current regular readers. I'd be pretty unhappy about it too. Of course, I think/. probably has more sense than to

"The other major handset maker -- Apple -- doesn't support Flash on the iPhone and has no plans to do so in the near future."
Since when did the tiny install base of a closed platform start competing with Windows Mobile, S60 or RIM? This is just stupid. The iPhone will never be a major player for businesses as long as Emperor Jobs keeps the platform locked down. It can't even multitask.

The other major handset maker -- Apple -- doesn't support Flash on the iPhone and has no plans to do so in the near future.

I think this is a real problem for iPhone owners. Most iPhone owners love their Safari browser - yet they are denied all Flash content on the iPhone.

Remember that funny "get a Mac" web ad that has the PC on the ladder, attempting to repair the broken Vista signage? That was a Flash-based ad. And millions of iPhone users couldn't even see it. Or hear it.

Without Flash support, many web sites lose important advertising revenue. The lack of Flash support is a true shame, taking power away from customers w

It certainly wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to not include it (short of any technical reasons, that is).
If Microsoft didn't include it, they certainly wouldn't see more sales. (Depending... some people are quite against flash -- but in a lot of cases those same people are also against Microsoft).
Silverlight is similar, but of a much different flavour. In all honesty (to me), it seems as though they just decided one day "Lets try to dip into this market and see where it takes us."
I don't seem to se

I keep hearing contradictory claims about the platforms supported or not
supported by Flash Player or Flash Lite... Adobe's website is uninformative.
Even their wikipedia articles are imprecise. AFAIK:

Flash Player [wikipedia.org],
which is the regular browser plugin, is currently (version 9) only available
for the i386 architecture (
this flash developer [kaourantin.net]
claims the JIT compiler in the Flash VM is delaying the port to x86-64).
Older versions (7 or earlier ?) used to be available for the PPC arch
for Mac OS, but PPC su

Flash Player--up to version 9--still supports Mac OS X on PPC. There is/was a full Flash player (v7) for Windows Mobile. It was bad.Flash Lite 2.0 doesn't support video and is more or less compatible with ActionScript as implemented in Flash 7. Flash Lite 3.0 is very new and does support video and parts of Flash 8's ActionScript. It works on S60/Symbian, BREW and WM5. I don't know what processor architectures it supports. It will run in a browser on WM5/6, but the experience is really unpleasant (thou

I've witnessed the confusing litany of name changes and double switches that has occurred with Windows Mobile. It's gone from Windows CE to The OS Formerly Known as Windows CE, to Windows Pocket PC: Pocket Edition for Pockets to, I think, encompass any device with a touch screen that now runs Windows Mobile 5/6. And would I be correct to assume that still excludes "smartphones?"

I just ported our administrative database generator application from Windows Mobile to the desktop. It used to take 1 to 4 hours on the handheld device... it takes less than 30 seconds on the desktop. (It was originally a Pocket PC app because there wasn't a way to use SQL Mobile from desktop applications.)

I just had a horrific vision of me as schoolkid with Bill Gates stood by my front door in a padded dressing gown, giving me a peck on the cheek, putting my schoolcap on my head and saying "Bye, dear, have a nice day at school!"

And Steve Ballmer as my dad waiting in his car by the school gates as I climb into the passenger seat after a hard day at school. And as he turns the key in the ignition, he looks at me and says: